2017 May 11^th

Trump’s firing of FBI director Comey continues to reverberate. An interview with President Trump, conducted by Lester Holt, will play tonight on NBC. Trump claims that he fired Comey because “he wasn’t doing a good job” and that he would appoint a successor who would restore the bureau’s morale. By most reports those in the bureau deeply resent the firing; they are either angered at the high-handed way it was done or they are now worried about their own jobs.

The Trumpian theme of, “He wasn’t doing a good job” boils down to, “He wasn’t investigating what I wanted the bureau to investigate” so I fired him. Trump seems to believe that the FBI is his personal investigative organization. He would like the FBI to stop investigating the Russian connections to his political campaign and to get on with an investigation of the embarrassing leaks about him to the press. That isn’t likely to happen and his firing of Comey reduces the odds even farther because Trump is even less the favorite person of bureau employees.

Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director, flatly contradicted President Trump’s claim that the rank-and-file FBI agents had low morale and were dissatisfied with Comey’s leadership. Trump’s supporters are pushing for the support of Democrats here; Representative Maxine Waters from California has maintained that should Hilary Clinton have been elected she should have fired Comey immediately. This Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s substitute flack, maintains, just shows the Democrat’s hypocrisy because the Democrats are now upset by Comey’s firing.

Representative Waters is not a paragon of carefully considered comment. These are two totally different things. The Clinton fiasco produced by Comey had to do with his appalling judgment about commenting on the Weiner emails before he had bothered to look at them. Then, later, admitting that he had found nothing new in them.

When Trump fired Comey, there was a well-founded suspicion that Comey, like Preet Bahara and Sally Yates, were closing in on Trump’s Russian connections. That possibility Trump could not permit and firing Comey was the result of his mistaken notion that he could stop that investigation. He couldn’t and now he knows that. He’ll try something else, but this bit of pique has cost him some support and other support from his core is wavering. He is back down to a 36 percent approval rating. There are Republicans who, seeing the angry faces at town meetings, will peel away from supporting him to save their 174 thousand dollar a year congressional jobs.

Then today Trump hosted the Russian Ambassador Kislyak and the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in the Oval Office. This meeting came at the express request of Premier Putin. It was the first such meeting since 2013 when we decided to indicate our displeasure with various Russian shenanigans.

The American press and their cameras were excluded from this event but we are allowed to view the friendly interaction between Trump and his Russian friends through the curtesy of Russian television. Our press, the enemy of the people, were excluded from the meeting so we watch the event curtesy of Russian television. Down the rabbit hole we go once again.